Update - Monday, June 18, 2007

This whole PvE skills update smacks of grading a term paper that a high schooler wrote, in its entirety, the night before it was due.

Months of designing and testing these skills? Sounds like the same likely excuse said high school student would give after seeing their paper recieved a C-!

It's not just the opinion of players that Anet listens to. They do have computers and fancy programs.

I wouldn't be surprised if they are able to print off raw data regarding the number of players using X skills and what sort of damage/defense they are doing in comparison to before.
Not to mention watching us with "Observer mode: Dev edition" and the certainty that the plague of 55's would be trying to utilise the skills.

The only people i saw complaining about the skills around here were PvE players and the PvP guys were happy for us.
Don't point the finger at the PvP'ers, we're not at war with them anymore.

Truce!

Elementalist: Wow anet, that's just great. Seriously. I LOVED intensity, now it sucks balls, and is unusable. It's becoming a god damn staple of Anet to screw skills over like this, and I'm getting pretty ticked. Elemental Lord, I'm not complaining. I could hit a 197 damage SF with Elemental Lord and Glyph, so I'm ok with the nerf to it, but Intensity is not useless, and I hope Anet makes some adjustments to the way they figure out which skills need to be nerfed or not.

I'm so happy, they used the idea of linking at least a few more of the skills to primary attributes. This makes the paragon and sin SS skills mainly useful under their primaries, and almost pointless for secondaries. Excellent!

However, the Ele skill is pretty useless for even eles now. But, it can still see use for initial nukes. 3 eles with Intensity and savannah heat, mark of rodgort, and tenai's heat all nuking one group will take it out in no time, no matter their level or amount of armor/life. Eles are still #1 damage dealers in PvE, they really didn't need that much more help with that.

Interesting adjustment to Cry of Pain, makes it even more useful for me really. Would still like to see it disable the interrupted skill but I won't hold my breath.

Any chance of Necrosis becoming more practical? Like maybe dropping the damage and making it shadow? Or how about inflicting disease or poison if it lands?

Also the doubled faction boost on donation was a classy touch and much appreciated.

Seed of Life is bugged too.

It stacks on one person.

For instance if Player A with 11 divine favor and Player B with 5 divine favor cast Seed of Life on Player C, whenever Player C gets hit, the party will be healed for 22hp and 10hp.

The same kind of stacking happens with Enchanter's Conundrum.

50 people could cast Arcane Conundrum on someone and then use shatter delusions and the damage would trigger 50 times.

Eles are still the number one damage dealers, agreed, although there is probably a few Rit builds or SS/MM builds out there that could come close or exceed this, but seriously. Unless your going into DoA, or a high powered area, 3 eles is overkill. 2 eles is usually enough, and I thought intensity would make my job a bit easier, but NO, they had to hit it with a bat till it keeled over and died to 45 second recharge, and lower duration.

well at least they made an update =)

why not just halve the amount needed for each lower rank if you insist on keeping the skills tied to the faction title...

this whole pve skills things has been kind of a let down.... grinding for the faction ones, skills that are just overpowered elites instead of doing anything special, then they get toned down to just be duplicates of normal skills with different conditionals, basically...

GW:EN and GW2 are looking less and less attractive with the more we see about where the GW team is heading...

AND THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

it has begun kiddies.....the PVE NERF BAT

this nerf was done by the new PVE ONLY cant blame PVP nerf bat.

this was done to a PVE ONLY skill by the brand new PVE nerf bat

more to come with more PVE ONLY skills

brace yourselves

So, yeah, earlier today, while the new build came out, my buddy and I were playing Hard Mode. I was a W/P with "There's Nothing to Fear!" with a Zealous sword and an IAS, spamming the shout whenever it recharged. He was a monk with Seed of Life. We used all heroes. We rampaged through the area, overaggroing everything in sight and managing to survive.

For a minute there, these skills seemed a bit imbalanced, since it turned Hard Mode into another Normal Mode. Oh wait, I thought Hard Mode was supposed to be hard. Seriously, to those people whining about how their godmode skills got nerfed, grow up. Hard Mode shouldn't be able to be rampaged through like that.

Although I seriously disagree with the nerf on Intensity. You sort of stabbed it and threw it in a pool full of sharks for no reason oncesoever. What I'm trying to say is, these PvE-only skills shouldn't exactly be godmode skills that overpower every elite skill in your class, but should still be a worthwhile addition to any PvE bar.

I have to ask why nerf elemental lord of you can pretty much get the same thing with some holiday items and the avatar rez shrine blessing (last longer). The only problem is that A-net still has the Favor system working with the rez-shrine system and holiday items come in every once in a while. Nevertheless why nerf it, if there are ways in enhancing your Ele abilities the same way but with less effort at times?

I didn't think that much of it pre-nerf.

Fortunately, I can easily afford the cost of acquiring some of these now-useless skills for my elementalist.

Watch them turn into elites. Hah!

The reason why the initial overpowered state of these skills wasn't an issue for me was that EVERY profession could use them with the same effectiveness, therefore balance wasn't an issue. I decided uniqueness was preserved in the set of skill combinations available for each profession (only Elementalists and Mesmers could use Cry of Pain + Intensity, for example).

This update has not only completely destroyed that reason by denying the full potential of skills from some professions (Assassin, Paragon) to secondaries, but left some professions (look at the Elementalist) with much less than they had before to compensate for that loss. And what for? So certain primaries would seem more valuable without secondaries to compete? Come on now. If a "primary-exclusive" title skill is the backbone reason for inviting these professions into a group, I'm gonna laugh and go pick a henchman.

This is NOT a rant at Anet, who didn't even have to bother with these skills in the first place. I wouldn't bitch at them for their trouble, nor would I ask that they undo this change to suit my selfish interests. But just maybe some of these points haven't been considered and are worth a thought.

This part made sense. It was ok pre-nerf, but yeah wasnt the greatest skill you could use.
This part didnt make sense though... no one mentioned cost of getting the skill as you need 1 hero skill point and any amount of sunspear points into the title, so this was one of the easiest pve skills to get. I dont see the complaint here.... or even what this had to do with the thread.

Oh great. First everyone complains that Paragon primaries got shafted since any profession could use THTF, but now that they fix it and now the complains start rolling.

Anyways, I'm personally glad to see these changes come into play. Crit Agility on a Dervish was fun, but it was way overpowered.

I think the Ranger skills coulda used a bit more love, but meh, it could be worse.

Overall the changes are pretty fair.

Ok, now that my anger over the nerf of one of my new favorite skills has subsided, I would propose this for a change to Intensity. Lower the skill recharge to 30 seconds, like before, but keep it a 10 second duration. The energy cost might be lowered to 10 seconds, but that might make it overpowered again, and god knows what happens to skills when Anet figures that out. WOAH, I just noticed that they decreased the energy cost of Intensity to 5 secs. Nerf that to 10 seconds, and lower the recharge time to 30, and you've got a perfect skill, although it may be a bit overpowered, although I can't tell because it hasn't been changed.

They targeted three of the five skills I pretty much figured would be revised - Critical Agility, There's Nothing to Fear and Intensity.

As people gain Luxon/Kurzick ranks, I'm figuring that they'll go after Save Yourselves!

Surprised that they didn't touch Necrosis. It's a completely wicked skill for Necromancers and Mesmers at this point.

Uh, they've already nerfed Necrosis once, you want them to nerf it again?